For a man who painted the human body with such visceral detail — nude, overweight, old, sagging skin, blotchy colouring, awkward poses — Lucian Freud’s Self-Portrait with Hyacinth in Pot, painted in 1947-48, cuts a rather handsome figure.
The sketch, unlike his paintings, is a flat two-dimensional view of the 25-year-old artist’s face wearing a contemplative look. His coat and hair are remarkably well-detailed, as are the hyacinths growing out of a pot behind the artist. If his paintings present us with what can only be described as the essential ugliness of the human form and condition, this work lends no hint of it. In Freud’s universe, this man — he, himself — is remarkably plain.
Contrast this with Freud’s later etchings, like Solicitor’s Head (2003; completed at age 80, eight years before his death). The woman lying on a pillow looks soul-tired. Her skin bunches up near her shirt collar, the folds around her neck meld into her chin, and her skin seems puffy.
David Dawson, Freud’s former assistant, told The Guardian in 2008 that the artist would often stand extremely close to his subjects, and possessed a nervous energy that could keep the sitter on the edge of their seat. These portraits did more than express detail; they revealed the inner life of their subjects.
Born in Berlin in 1922 to Jewish architect Ernst L Freud (son of Sigmund Freud), Lucian fled Germany with his family in 1933 and settled in London. A trained artist, his initial works were landscapes and still lifes, and he attained a great deal of critical acclaim from the start of his career.
“When Lucian Freud first appeared on the London art scene during the second world war, he and his work were met by journalistic hyperbole,” art historian Andrew Wilson writes, in a note to an upcoming lecture on the artist at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Denmark. “Despite the later stylistic shifts in his painting, Freud’s mythically-conceived personality was thus largely fixed already by the end of the 1940s.”
The lecture, later this month, is part of a summer exhibition on display at the Louisiana until end-September, organised in collaboration with the National Portrait Gallery, London (which first hosted the show from February to May).
GROSS BENEFIT
Freud belongs to a transhistorical assembly of painters who have attempted to zoom in on what could be called an essential “ugliness” in the human form and condition, and render it for posterity.
To him, everyone was ugly, and the ugliness was intriguing.
Though portraits had already come to dominate his work in the 1940s, his figurative style found a new naturalistic expression towards the late-1950s.
In 1958-59, he began to use a hog’s-hair paintbrush, which was coarser and added lines and depth to faces he rendered. In Woman Smiling, modelled on artist Suzy Boyt, for instance, the nose and cheeks possess both colour and heft, drawing the viewer’s attention away from her small smile. This is where the light pools and dips when Boyt puckers her mouth, Freud seems to say.
His canvases often depict people from his inner circle: wives Kitty Garman (an artist) and Caroline Blackwood (a writer); artist-friends Francis Bacon and Leigh Bowery; many of his children (he formally acknowledged 14). He also painted celebrities and public figures, from Queen Elizabeth II to supermodel Kate Moss.
Though his turn towards the nude form began in the late-1960s, it is four works from the 1990s, depicting plus-sized artist model Sue Tilley, a state employment agency benefits supervisor, that are widely considered his masterpieces.
Benefits Supervisor Sleeping (1995) reveals Tilley in all her glory, with blotches and blemishes, wholly un-idealised. The piece set a record for highest price for a work by a living artist, when it sold for $33.6 million at a Christie’s auction in 2008.
’JUST AS FLESH DOES’
In his photobook A Painter’s Progress: A Portrait of Lucian Freud (2014), Dawson recounts something Freud once told art critic William Feaver: “If I’m putting someone in a picture, I like to feel that they’ve fallen asleep there, or they’ve elbowed their own way in. They are there not to make the picture easy on the eye or more pleasant.”
He liked things to look awkward in the way that life looks awkward. The idea of a story didn’t bother him as he thought “everything’s a story”, Dawson writes.
Not everyone felt comfortable with his methods. His daughter Rose Boyt (one of three children born of his relationship with Suzy Boyt) wrote, in Naked Portrait: A Memoir of Lucian Freud (2024), of his “sex talk” as she posed naked for a portrait, aged 18. Speaking to The Guardian, she said: “I just smiled and laughed when I should have put my hands over my ears and screamed: Shut up you sick fu*k.”
Today, he would face far greater scrutiny, for his parenting as well as his relationships with far-younger women, many of whom first met him as models in his studio. Yet he continues to be counted as one of the greatest painters of the 20th century.
“His early paintings redefined British art and his later works stand comparison with the great figurative painters of any period,” then director of the Tate Gallery Nicholas Serota said, when Freud died in 2011.
The artist understood his genius in his lifetime. A few years before his death, he told art curator and academic Michael Auping, “As far as I am concerned the paint is the person. I want it to work for me just as flesh does.”
